My first choice came to me through my book club. I began it begrudgingly, but Matthew Pearl's "The Dante Club" turned out to be a perfect match for my low condition, a macabre thriller of fiery imagination run amok.
In October 1865 Cambridge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and publisher J.T. Fields are working on the first American translation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy." The Harvard administration, though, is passionately against this project, considering it a potentially dangerous introduction of "foreign superstition" into America.
The scholars are pressing bravely on when a horrific and inexplicable murder takes the life of a Boston judge. Then a popular Unitarian minister is killed. Holmes realizes that someone is using Dante's "Inferno" as a model for murder, someone who must have access to their work. The poets are transformed into sleuths in a deadly race to save the lives of Boston's elite, the reputation of Dante Alighieri and their own translation.
Matthew Pearl's love for literature and his historical characters is evident, as is the depth of scholarship underpinning his completely fictional murder mystery. Since "The Dante Club" he has written two more novels, one featuring Edgar Allan Poe and one Charles Dickens, where, once again, "the right way had been lost."
"The Dante Club" might put film buffs in mind of "Se7en," but it made me think of an old favorite, "Death and the Penguin" by Andrey Kurkov. Set in Kiev, this tells the story of Viktor, a down-and-out journalist and his penguin. Misha came to live in Viktor's flat when the cash-strapped zoo started giving hungry creatures away to anyone willing to feed them.
Viktor took Misha out of loneliness but discovers that Misha has a loneliness all his own, and the flat now houses "two complementary lonelinesses" rather than true companions. Viktor worries that Misha seems sad, but he has his own problems. Visits from the muse are infrequent and brief, and he despairs of ever having his work published.
Out of the blue, opportunity knocks. The Capital News offers Viktor a job preparing advance obituaries for famous still-living people, what the newspaper calls obelisks. As Viktor contemplates the obelisk form he sees how it could be "vitalized" and "sentimentalized" so that every reader, no matter what, would end up brushing away a tear.
He plunges into the work, and his editor is pleased. The pay is good, and he enjoys treating himself to cognac and Misha to frozen salmon. But his work is still not in print, and Misha still seems depressed.
Then everything changes. Viktor's obelisks begin to appear. People are dying. A pattern develops: he completes an assignment and the person dies within the week! Viktor realizes too late that he is in over his head. And Misha? Misha is going down with him.
The wintry streets of Kiev and a penguin with depressive syndrome naturally put me in mind of Minnesota and a favorite author from there, Robert Clark. "Mr. White's Confession," one of his best novels, is set in St. Paul.
Mr. White, a quiet, eccentric photographer, finds himself the prime suspect in a sordid murder case. In an unusual combination of character study and hard-boiled thriller, Clark presents the story of a man who couldn't possibly commit murder but can't know for sure that he didn't.
I learned today that meteorological winter is now over. But the nights are still cold and dark enough. There's still time to snuggle down under the covers and listen for the plip-plopping sound of a penguin coming down the hall.
Photo from chispita_666 (Creative Commons)
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